Writer Wander 033 - Spoilers are Good, Actually

Spoiler Warnings are a Crime Against Humanity

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Rider Wander Thirty Three Why You Should Not Care About Spoilers Spoilers It's a Subject That Seems To Come in Literally Every Sleep Rating To Storytelling In the Modern Era. It seems you can't run anywhere without wanting to read about a certain story and then being told that oh this thing is gonna happen in the story and then having a thousand people jump out at you and get pissed off at you for quote unquote spoiling the thing that was supposed to be found out in the course of reading through the story. Now why is it that I think that spoilers the concept of a spoiler is bad? I think that uh you know just jumping straight into the topic, spoilers as a concept are bad because from a purely conceptual level, the idea that a story can be ruined just because you reveal things that are meant to happen in the story before they happen is less evidence that you ruined the story, and is more evidence that the story just was not that good to begin with, right? And I don't know who made this point to me for the first time, but the more I think about it, the more it gets validated for me, and um, you know, it goes something like this it's this idea that you know, when you really think about it, especially when you talk about really old stories, you never care about spoilers, right? You only really care about spoilers when you're talking about stuff that's relatively new and came out, but when we're talking about like older stuff, we don't care about it, and you know, I wonder what that is, right? You know, because people usually say something along the lines, oh man, um it's an old story, so you probably heard about it by now. Except that that's not correct, because again, first of all, in the context of book books, uh, most people don't read, and secondly, even when it comes to famous stories, there are a significant number of people who have not experienced them for the first time. It is one thing for a story to become prominent due to cultural osmosis, and it is another thing for that story to have a significant amount of people reading it or otherwise consuming it. Think of Snow White or a lot of the early Disney movies. Um, a lot of those are are classics, and people have a broad idea of how they move or how they go, yet um in practice, I think most people, especially with the older Disney stuff, have not watched it. There's probably a surprising amount of people, especially nowadays, that have not watched any classic Mickey Mouse movies or Mickey Mouse properties, right? Most people are just familiar with Mickey Mouse from uh the logos that he appears on relating to Disney and and as a symbol, but when it comes to actual stuff containing Mickey Mouse doing Mickey Mouse things, there's not a lot of people that have experience with that, you know, there's not a lot of Steamboat Willie enjoyers around nowadays, but that begs the question, you know, considering the fact that you know people most people have not engaged with things that most people have engaged with, that gets rid of our main excuse for saying that, oh, it's okay to talk about spoilers with about when it comes to older stuff, right? So aside from that, I can think of no other good reason for why we would make an exception for giving people spoilers uh on things that are very old and very classic, uh, unless we assume that they had already read it. So that only leads me to conclude the more logical explanation that a good story, a classic story, will not be diminished whatsoever by somebody choosing to reveal something to you about that story beforehand. If you look at epic tales like the like the Odyssey or or you know or the Bible, for instance, these are stories that are so fundamental to our culture, and how do we treat them? These stories that are super important to us, we we skip to the end, right? You know, you think about the Bible. The first thing you'll hear when someone preaches to you is that your Jesus Christ died for your sins and he resurrected. You know, it's like you're spoiling the ending, bro. You're spoiling the ending, but it's not that he's spoiling anything, you know, it's just that our understanding of what it means for something to be spoiled, our understanding of what it means for a for for a piece of media, though I I would not describe the Bible as a as merely a piece of media, but you know what I mean. What it means for us to enjoy these things and to derive value from it, I think it is heavily distorted in the modern era due to these concepts of of the spoiler. Because what is the spoiler? The spoiler is just something that if anything, it might put a damper on your superficial enjoyment of a story, right? You know, what when you're you're when you're enjoying a story for the sole purpose of you know, you you just want to see what happens next. Oh, you're hooked on the you know on the process of what of what's going on, right? But you know, you know, just wanting to know how things are gonna are gonna unfold and whatnot, this is not uh this is not an in a level of engagement with a form of media that is particularly deep, to be entirely frank with you. I think more often than not, at least historically, people are more interested in seeing the way that things unfold in a story rather than so much the thing itself, right? You know, going back to the example of the Iliad or or the Odyssey, you know, you you might know Odysseus eventually reaches his home. Okay, how did he do that? How long did it take for him to reach his home? It took so long that the very concept of going on an Odyssey, that literally the guy's name, is synonymous with going on a long journey. The Bible, Jesus Christ, God, died and and resurrected. Okay, what are what are how that how does that happen? Isn't that a paradox? Isn't that something that that that just seems to defy the categorization of what a god should be? Well, that's what hooks you into learning about the story. Learning about what happens, the Lord of the Rings. This is the story about how the Dark Lord was defeated and the force is a good triumph. Okay, you know that when you just when you're just describing the result, that that in and of itself is not interesting. What's really interesting is the unfolding of the thing, and you could say, Oh, somebody can spoil to you how things unfold, except that that's not really the case either, because people cannot spoil to you how things unfold unless they literally recite the story word by word to you, okay? Because if someone tells you how something unfolded, they're just giving you like a very high-level version of the things that happen in the story. But if you want to get a good idea of how things unfolded, you have to get into the story, get into the detail, and this is why plot summaries will never be a true replacement for storytelling. This is why plot summaries, whether it be they be AI generated or whether they be you know, from like uh what's what was that thing called? Like Spark Notes, the thing that everyone used to cheat on their like literature exams, you know, that thing, you know, they will never be true replacements for actual engagement with literature because you have to be in the moment. And the fact that, you know, I guess this is a bit of a tangent, but the fact that students are resorting to technologies like this in order to bypass the process of reading, I think it is more of an indictment of the the way in which we are handling the uh the literary education of our children that is making them disengaged with something that uh on the contrary should make them want to enjoy that. But past the level of wanting to understand how things unfold, there is another aspect which is even deeper, which is that you know, with really great stories, you there's nothing wrong with you reading them again, first of all, because because we have we have our memory is not infallible, and over time we forget things, and there's nothing like reading the thing again to get an idea of how things are gonna go or see things from from a different or or new perspective. But themes are the spice of of life, you know, reflecting on the meaning of a story once you're rereading allows you to reread it constantly, even if you know what's gonna happen, right? My my sometimes favorite novelist, uh, when I'm you know I'm often debating between him and and Tolkien, um, but Gene Wolf, he explicitly designed stories with the idea that you could reread them and recontextualize information in them such that the narrative naturally gained even more depth upon the second reading. And that's what I really liked about him. And I didn't care that I already knew what was gonna happen. In fact, a lot of times with stories, the things that actually motivate me to start reading them are the fact that somebody spoils something to me. You know, I remember, oh, by the way, you know, it should be obvious. Um, this is the last time I'm gonna make a spoiler warning about anything on this uh, you know, on this particular episode, because it would defeat the purpose. In fact, it is kind of hypocritical for me to be giving one right now, but you know what, dude? Uh I you know I I know that this is very important to some people, but um, I'm not gonna give another one. So if you actually care about spoilers for like anything, because I don't know what else is gonna come up, but yeah, you can you should probably leave. Um but I remember Berserk, one of the things that made me wanna Berserk, in case you don't know, is a very famous anime and manga with a very dark fantasy storyline, and you know, obviously it is justifiably a classic in the genre, but one of the things that motivated me to read Berserk was not even the fact that I started reading it. One of the main things that motivated me to read Berserk was that on on one occasion, um uh someone described to me, I think it was a YouTuber, uh, described to me something that happens early on in the story, which is called the eclipse, in which the main character's friends, the which the main character's best friend betrays him, sacrifices him and his other friends to eldritch gods, and the these demonic entities proceed to graphically um use one of the uh you know the use the love interest of this main character and so traumatize that woman such that for the majority of the rest of that story that young woman is mute and has forgotten all of her all of her personality, right? So when I heard that, there's a lot of people that will hear that and be like, oh man, bro, why are you spoiling that? What what's wrong with you, you you idiot, you Sigmar, you're you're spoiling one of the greatest twists of all time. But honestly, man, I I don't think I think that people who think like that, they're just not thinking ahead. If you're someone who thinks like that, I'm sorry to inform you, but I think that you have a lack of a vision, and this is not an insult to you. Don't don't don't treat this like an insult, treat this like a challenge to the way that you're currently looking at things. Because I'm proposing this, you know, if you are someone who thinks like that, you know, think about how we're gonna be talking about berserk a hundred years from now, assuming we remember it, right? Because you know, a lot of times there's art that's very popular in a given point in time, but as time passes, it ceases to be popular. I think Berserk has the potential to be remembered for a very long time. But if we ever talk about berserk again, uh hundreds of years from now, let's say like a generation after us, the reality is that we're probably just gonna skip straight to the spoilers, and no one no one's gonna care. No one's gonna care about that. We're just gonna go straight to the spoilers, and that's gonna be awesome. And people, and that's what's gonna be the things that we talk about, right? Because that's another thing that I don't like about spoiler culture, especially that I don't like a lot about the way that spoiler culture affects, you know, things like YouTube, for example. I feel that when we are hung up with trying to make spoiler-free reviews or spoiler-free analyses, it it creates a situation in which we are preventing ourselves from talking about the most fascinating parts of media for the purposes of of what of keeping someone pleased insofar as their external and superficial vulnerabilities are, because that's the reality. The reality is that most of the interesting things to talk about in a story are typically considered spoilers, and when you create this culture in which the default is to layer everything with like a spoiler warning or to just not talk about things at all, you know, we are preventing ourselves, we are preventing ourselves from properly engaging with media in a meaningful way. And whenever we start talking about berserk a hundred years in the future, and we start spoiling the eclipse, all of the crazy stuff that happens during the during the eclipse, and you know, all of those, all of those crazy things, when we start talking about it, I think we'll find out that the conversations that we have around these properties as a culture start to become a lot better because people are, you know, if you limit yourself to not talk about spoilers, in practice, what you're doing is that you are limiting yourself to only talking about the very superficial elements that are often presented in the beginning of a story, which are often not really what the story is about, and you're missing the forest for the trees. And I think that I concur with a lot of people in that this this idea of spoiler culture, you know, aside from the fact that uh oh that that's another thing. This is a very modern phenomenon, it's surprisingly modern, right? Like, if you look at the original Dragon Ball, right, you know, look freaking anime, you know, there is literally an episode where Krillin dies. Krillin dies! And the episode is just called the Death of Krillin! It's like, come on, bro! It's like who cares? Nobody cares about spoilers, or nobody should care at least. There are there are novels in which the you know, oftentimes the title of a chapter is that oh, this character dies. If you read a lot of classic novels, it's very common at the you know, uh for the preface of the novel for there be to like another writer or some professor to give like some ideas of concerning what happens in the story. And I I a lot of people don't enjoy reading those, but I actually quite enjoy it. But usually, especially when it's like a classic novel, the professor basically spoils the entire story, but no one cares because that you're not there for that, right? The story stands on its own, independent of whatever twist it is revealed to you beforehand. And I concur with a lot of people when we when we when we come to the conclusion that aside from this being something modern, this is a this is something that comes from movie culture that is being transplanted into basically every other form of media. And I think that the most modern iteration of this, it probably uh definitely has to do with the MCU, the Marvel Cinematic uh universe, which uh, you know, I'm not I'm not exactly a fan of. I'm not the biggest hater either, it's it's really just not for me. But you know, the the my issue, right, is that if you look at a lot of the things that people consider spoilers when they're when they're talking about the you know about about the the MCU, but most of the times, right, you know, it's something along the lines, oh, this character appears at one point in the story, and it's like this fan favorite character that no one thought would would appear. Or this villain is gonna be the villain of the next story and is being teased at in the in the in the current in the current trailer. And it's like you know, the things that are being treated as spoilers, the reason that we have this attitude towards spoilers is because when you actually spoil those things, the the the story becomes lesser because the story that we're talking about, in this case the MCU, is is just more superficial on a on a relative level. So when someone tells you that some some other superhero is gonna be appearing that no one was expecting, and it was supposed to be like this super big surprise, when somebody tells you that, well, then yes, the the story is kind of spoiled because there wasn't really anything more to that aside from the presence of that character. But when we start applying that to works of fiction, you know, uh obviously the MC is a work of fiction, but you know, works of literature and whatnot, you know, things that are you know generally more per more profound, and I'm not I'm not afraid to I'm not afraid to say that. I I genuinely believe that. I I don't believe in in the subjective value of art. I I believe that there is an objective standard. Even if we can't if we can't cogitate it, even if we're not capable of grasping or explaining it, I feel that there on some level there is an intuitive understanding of artistry that is common to to all peoples of worth. But again, that that's another subject as well. But when we transplant this superficial dialect, this superficial form of engaging with media into less superficial forms of media, into more profound stories. But when we translate that to that, then things are it just makes things worse for everyone. In fact, I feel that that's one of the reasons why the the culture surrounding books on on YouTube, in my opinion, is somewhat lacking because there's a lot of people that are uh and this is getting better over time because there's more people willing to do like analysis content where they openly talk about spoilers in in stories. But I feel that for a very long time, and it's only recently been getting better, you know, people who talked about books were limiting themselves to talking about stories in a way that did not enter into spoilers, and you know that just leads us to creating these very superficial, you know, these very half-baked conversations that don't really get into the heart of why this story is impacted at all, right? But uh that that was my that was my rant on spoilers. Um, I hope you could get something out of it. Uh Rider Wander, uh, keep wandering.